Friday, February 14, 2020

In Norway, bottles made of plastic are still fantastic

by Pierre-Henry Deshayes

With its 97 percent recycling rate, Norway is 10 years ahead of the EU's 2029 target date, by when countries must recycle at least 90 percent of their plastic bottles

One at a time, the elderly lady places her empties into the gaping hole of a machine at the entrance to an Oslo supermarket. With a well-functioning deposit system, Norway recycles almost all of its plastic bottles.

"You have to get rid of them, so you may as well do it intelligently," says the woman in her 70s, as the machine spits out a bar-code ticket that entitles her to around 30 kroner (three euros, $3.25) either in cash or credit at the till.

With its 97 percent recycling rate, Norway is 10 years ahead of the EU's 2029 target date, by when countries must recycle at least 90 percent of their plastic bottles.

That compares to barely 60 percent in France and in the UK, which is considering a deposit system.

The deposit system is widely viewed as the key to the Nordic country's success.

Customers pay a few extra cents when they buy a drink in a plastic bottle, and they're refunded that amount when they return their empties.

"When you have a deposit on the empties, you actually tell the consumers that they buy the product but they borrow the packaging," explains Kjell Olav Maldum, the head of Infinitum, a company created by manufacturers and distributors to run the deposit scheme.

The concept of returning empties has become so widespread there's even a verb in the Norwegian language for it: a pante (pronounced Oh pant-uh).

As an added bonus, the reverse vending machines give customers the choice of using their refund to buy a lottery ticket that benefits charity.

Unsolvable Rubik's cubes

More than 1.1 billion plastic bottles and aluminium cans were returned in 2018 at collection points in supermarkets, petrol stations and small shops.

In Fetsund, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) northeast of Oslo, a steady stream of trucks dump thousands of empties at a time at Infinitum's main processing centre.

Bouncing along on conveyor belts, the plastic bottles that once contained water, juice or soda are sorted, compacted and placed on pallets resembling enormous colourful Rubik's cubes, destined for a second life after recycling.

Each new plastic bottle contains around 10 percent recycled materials, a level the country hopes to increase with a regressive tax that would encourage manufacturers to use recycled plastic instead of new plastic, which is currently cheaper.

Valuable waste

"We call it clean loop recycling: if you put your bottles into a machine, they sort of enter a clean loop," says Harald Henriksen, head of business area collection solutions at Tomra, the world leader in reverse vending machines.

"You can use it again and again, and you can make new bottles many, many times," he says.

In this example of a circular economy, what some consider waste becomes a resource, whose value encourages collection and recycling.

The idea has begun to catch on elsewhere.

"One example is Lithuania where they had a 34-percent return rate before the deposit system was introduced, and at the end of year number two that had already increased to 92 percent," says Henriksen.

Larissa Copello of environmental organisation Zero Waste Europe told AFP deposit return systems are "the only way" to meet the EU target.

But the organisation would also like to see a mixed system that would collect glass bottles for reuse, and extend the deposit system to other types of plastic packaging.

According to WWF, the equivalent of 15 tonnes of plastic are dumped into the world's oceans every minute.

While the Norwegian recycling industry acknowledges the planet needs to put an end to the problem, they think plastic—a lightweight, practical and cheap material—still has a promising future.

"Is the problem with plastic itself, or is it the way that we the consumers behave ourselves," asks Maldum.

"Plastic is still fantastic but keep it out of nature."New way of recycling plant-based plastics instead of letting them rot in landfill

Smelling your lover's shirt could improve your sleep
HAPPY VALENTINES DAY PHEROMONES OF LOVE

by University of British Columbia

The scent of a romantic partner can improve sleep, suggests new psychology research from the University of British Columbia.

The researchers found that study participants who were exposed to their partner's scent overnight experienced better sleep quality, even though their partner was not physically present.

"Our findings provide new evidence that merely sleeping with a partner's scent improves sleep efficiency. Our participants had an average sleep efficiency improvement of more than two per cent," said Marlise Hofer, the study's lead author and a graduate student in the UBC department of psychology. "We saw an effect similar in size to what has been reported from taking oral melatonin supplements—often used as a sleep aid."

For the study, the researchers analyzed sleep data from 155 participants who were given two identical-looking t-shirts to use as pillowcases—one had been previously worn by their romantic partner, and the other had either been previously worn by a stranger or was clean.

To capture body odour on the t-shirts, the participants' partners were given a clean t-shirt to wear for 24 hours, and were asked to refrain from using deodorant and scented body products, smoking, exercising and eating certain foods that could affect their body odour. The t-shirts were then frozen to preserve their scent.

Each participant was then given two shirts to place over their pillows, without being told which one was which. They spent two consecutive nights sleeping with each t-shirt. Each morning, they completed a survey about how well-rested they felt. Their sleep quality was also objectively measured using an actigraphy sleep watch that monitored their movements throughout the night. At the end of the study, participants guessed if the shirts they had been sleeping with had previously been worn by their partner.

Participants reported feeling more well-rested on the nights when they believed they were sleeping with their partner's scent. Moreover, regardless of their beliefs about scent exposure, data from the sleep watches indicated that objective sleep improved when participants were actually exposed to their partner's scent.

"One of the most surprising findings is how a romantic partner's scent can improve sleep quality even outside of our conscious awareness," said Frances Chen, the study's senior author and associate professor in the UBC department of psychology. "The sleep watch data showed that participants experienced less tossing and turning when exposed to their partners' scent, even if they weren't aware of whose scent they were smelling."

The researchers say the physical presence of a long-term romantic partner is associated with positive health outcomes such as a sense of safety, calm and relaxation, which in turn leads to better sleep. By signalling recent physical proximity, the mere scent of a partner may have similar benefits.

Hofer says the research could pave the way for future work examining the efficacy of simple and effective methods of improving sleep, such as bringing a partner's shirt the next time you travel alone.

The researchers are currently recruiting participants for a pilot study to investigate whether the scent of parents can improve their infant's sleep quality.

The research has been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science.

Stressed out? Try smelling your partner's shirt

Protecting redundancy in the food web helps ensure ecological resilience

by Harrison Tasoff, University of California - Santa Barbara

In 2014, a disease of epidemic proportions gripped the West Coast of the U.S. You may not have noticed, though, unless you were underwater.

Fueled by abnormally hot ocean temperatures, sea star wasting disease ravaged these echinoderms from Alaska to Mexico. The condition, still not fully understood, wiped out a significant marine predator, the sunflower star. The sunflower star was a particularly important predator of sea urchins, and since the sea star's disappearance, the urchins it preyed upon have multiplied and laid waste to large swaths of kelp forest. However, the spiny scourge seemed to have spared some areas, especially those where multiple urchin predators occurred, particularly within marine protected areas.

A team of marine biologists, led by recent UC Santa Barbara graduate Jake Eisaguirre, has investigated what factors kept urchins in check in marine protected areas in the western Channel Islands. They found that a redundancy in urchin predators, and the protection afforded to them, seems to be responsible. The results offer a new perspective on strategies to manage ecosystems for resilience and highlight an underappreciated benefit of marine reserves. The study appears in the journal Ecology.

"This sea star wasting disease was a very impactful and rapid event," said Jennifer Caselle, a research biologist at the university's Marine Science Institute (MSI), an adjunct faculty member in ecology, evolution and marine biology and one of the study's coauthors. "We had abundant sea stars on our reefs, and within one year we had no sea stars." The researchers haven't seen a single sunflower star since 2014.

The sunflower star's disappearance rippled through the entire kelp forest food web in what scientists call a trophic cascade. The team's research indicated that even a few sunflower stars could effectively control an area's urchin population, so without them, the populations exploded, and the kelp forests turned into barrens in many places in California.

And unfortunately, it's easier for a kelp forest to become an urchin barren than for it to return to its original state. "There are feedbacks that prevent it from shifting back," said lead author Eisaguirre. "One of them could be that the abundant urchins on the 'urchin barrens' are starved and provide no nutrition to predators, so nothing wants to eat them."

Puzzling oases

While the urchins mowed down vast tracts of kelp in some regions, especially in Northern California, the researchers noticed that kelp in marine protected areas off the Channel Islands was still relatively healthy. They suspected it may be related to the urchin's other two predators in the region: the California sheephead and California spiny lobster.

Both of these species occur primarily in Southern California, and are both heavily fished. "We thought that the protection of these other predators, even though they weren't highly abundant in the western part of the Channel, may still have helped to compensate for the loss of the sunflower star," said coauthor Katie Davis, a research scientist at MSI.

The patchwork layout of marine protected areas around the Channel Islands provided an ideal setup to test the effect marine reserves had on sea urchin predators, and accordingly, the urchins themselves. Adjacent areas are virtually identical except for their status as open or closed to fishing. What's more, the research group has been collecting data in the area for more than 20 years under the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO), a long-term ecological project.

The team looked at data spanning several years before and after the onset of sea star wasting disease, examining how the assemblage of urchin predators changed. They used statistical models to investigate how different variables—like the size and abundance of the three predators, protected status of different sites and sea surface temperature—might have affected sea urchin populations. These models suggested that not only the abundance, but also the size of the remaining predators in the system were important.

Diversity and redundancy

Before the onset of the disease, the abundance of sunflower stars had the most pronounced effect on urchin populations. However, after the outbreak, the best predictors of urchin numbers were the abundance and size of the remaining predators. And, by comparing across a number of sites, the researchers found that predators were more abundant and larger within protected areas.

The scientists concluded that the marine protected areas released the predators from fishing pressures, so they were able to effectively fill the void left after the sunflower stars died off. Outside the protected areas, where the predators are smaller and less abundant, they were less able to compensate for the loss of the sea stars. This is one of the first studies showing that marine protected areas can confer ecosystem resilience by ensuring the protection of critical species functions.

"When you have multiple different species all performing similar functions, if something catastrophic happens to one of them, those functions can still be maintained," explained Caselle. In this case the function was predation, but the concept applies more broadly.

The state of affairs in Northern California supported the team's conclusion. The ocean north of San Francisco is too cold for sheephead and lobsters, and the otters that are well established on the Central Coast haven't been able to get a foothold north of the bay. As a result, the urchin population grew relatively unchecked once the sunflower star disappeared. The spiny hordes have since decimated the kelp forests of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.

The scientists also found that predators' sizes made a big difference, especially for the sheephead. "What surprised us the most was that even really small differences in sheephead size resulted in really big differences in how many urchins they could eat," Caselle said. This is because bigger fish have bigger mouths that can crack bigger sea urchins.

One of the most common effects in marine reserves is that fish grow larger and become more numerous. Many studies have shown that this increases reproduction rates, since larger fish release disproportionately more eggs than smaller fish. However, this study is one of the first to highlight another, underappreciated effect: The larger fish are also able to better control urchins, eating more of them, as well as the larger, more fertile individuals.

"And that's important because even small differences in fishing pressure can result in those size class differences for the sheephead," Caselle added.

"We are moving into a situation now where resource managers and resource users are having serious conversations about active restoration of kelp forests and other habitats being altered by climate change. Restoration may be the only option if we want kelp forests to retain their functions and their diversity," she continued. Fortunately, these findings show that we may be able to manage ecosystems for resilience to environmental changes by protecting multiple species that provide critical functions and recognizing that redundancy is important.

In the future, the team wants to investigate the feedback cycles at work, especially those involving sheephead, with an eye toward how these insights can be leveraged for ecosystem restoration. They will also continue their long-term monitoring with a special focus on understanding the effectiveness of marine protected areas and how they confer resilience to climate change.

When it comes to predators, size matters

More information: Jacob H. Eisaguirre et al, Trophic redundancy and predator size class structure drive differences in kelp forest ecosystem dynamics, Ecology (2020). DOI: 10.1002/ecy.2993

Journal information: Ecology

UPDATED
US astronaut returns to Earth after longest mission by woman

IF SHE WERE A MAN TRUMP WOULD HAVE CONGRATULATED HER

A WEEK LATER HE STILL HAS NOT MENTIONED HER

Record-setting astronaut feels good after near year in space

by Marcia Dunn

NASA's new record-setting astronaut said Wednesday that aside from sore muscles and trouble with balance, she's readjusting well to gravity after nearly 11 months in space.

Christina Koch met with reporters in Houston six days after returning to Earth from the International Space Station. Her 328-day mission—which ended last Thursday—was the longest ever by a woman.

Her neck hurt for about a day. "I felt like a 2-week-old who was actually working hard to hold up my own head," she said.

She considers herself lucky she didn't have the sore feet and burning skin suffered four years ago by NASA's all-time endurance champ, Scott Kelly, whose mission lasted 340 days.

Koch returned home to Galveston, Texas, to find a kitchen full of chips and salsa, something she'd craved in orbit, along with the Gulf of Mexico. She hit the beach with her husband, Bob, and their dog, a rescue pup named LBD for Little Brown Dog, just three days after her landing in Kazakhstan.

LBD was excited to see her, and vice versa.

"I'm not sure who was more excited to see the other," Koch said.

Their reunion was recorded. "It's just a symbol of coming back to the people and places that you love, to see your favorite animal," she said.

The 41-year-old Koch is an electrical engineer who also has a physics degree. She flew to the space station last March and was part of the first all-female spacewalk in October. Three astronauts remain at the orbiting lab, including the other half of the all-female spacewalk, NASA's Jessica Meir

US astronaut sets record for longest spaceflight by a woman

NASA astronaut comes home to chips and salsa after record 11 months in space

Marcia Dunn The Associated Press Wednesday, February 12, 2020

U.S. astronaut Christina Koch reacts shortly after the landing of the Russian Soyuz MS-13 space capsule about 150 km south-east of the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020. (Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool Photo via AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. -- NASA's new record-setting astronaut said Wednesday that aside from sore muscles and trouble with balance, she's readjusting well to gravity after nearly 11 months in space.

Christina Koch met with reporters in Houston six days after returning to Earth from the International Space Station. Her 328-day mission -- which ended last Thursday -- was the longest ever by a woman.

Her neck hurt for about a day. "I felt like a 2-week-old who was actually working hard to hold up my own head," she said.

Boom and bust for ancient sea dragons

by University of Bristol

Ichthyosaurs rapidly evolved a large range of forms and sizes early in their evolution, but after a bottle neck at the end of the Triassic, show much slower rates and more restricted variety. Credit: Dr Ben Moon & Dr Tom Stubbs

A new study by scientists from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, shows a well-known group of extinct marine reptiles had an early burst in their diversity and evolution—but that a failure to adapt in the long-run may have led to their extinction.

Ichthyosaurs were fish-like reptiles that first appeared about 250 million years ago and quickly diversified into highly capable swimmers, filling a broad range of sizes and ecologies in the early Mesozoic oceans. However, this rapid pace didn't last long and an evolutionary bottleneck 200 million years ago, through which only one lineage of ichthyosaurs survived, led to much slower evolution in much of their long history.

Dr. Ben Moon, who led the research, published in the journal Communications Biology, said: "Ichthyosaurs are a fascinating group of animals to work on because they evolved so many adaptations for living in water very quickly: a fish-like body and tail fin, giving birth to live young rather than laying eggs, and lots of different feeding styles.

"Because of this we expected to see a rapid evolution early after ichthyosaurs first appeared, but we were staggered by just how big this early burst was and how relatively short it was."

There are over 100 known species of ichthyosaur from between 250–90 million years ago in the Mesozoic Era, when the infamous dinosaurs ruled the land and the seas were full of marine reptiles, the top predators that filled comparable roles to dolphins, orcas, and sharks in modern seas.

This very complete specimen of the ichthyosaur Suevoleviathan is from the Early Jurassic of Germany. Many excellently preserved ichthyosaur fossils are known from this time and have been collected from the UK and Germany. Mary Anning from Lyme Regis is intimately associated with fossil collection and found the first recognized ichthyosaur fossils in 1810. Credit: Dr Ben Moon & Dr Tom Stubbs

The study used state-of-the-art computational methods and looked at two types of data, one covering skull size and the other including many features of ichthyosaurs' skeleton. All methods show an 'early burst' of evolution in ichthyosaurs, with high rates and rapid variation soon after the appearance of the group, that quickly diminishes later on.

Co-author Dr. Tom Stubbs said: "Ichthyosaurs really dominated early in the Triassic (252–201 million years ago), rapidly evolving in an ocean with few predators soon after the largest known mass extinction in Earth's history. However, the seas quickly became more crowded and competitive, and ichthyosaurs lost their top position in the Jurassic (201–145 million years ago) to other marine reptiles like plesiosaurs and pliosaurs.

"It may well have been the ichthyosaurs' decreasing evolutionary rates which made them less able to adapt quickly, and therefore less diverse and competitive, allowing other marine reptiles to take over as the top predators."

Despite slower evolution and going through a bottleneck at the end of the Triassic period, ichthyosaurs remained a common group but had less variation between them. These are perhaps best known ichthyosaurs, found in several UK locations, including Lyme Regis in Dorset, and first collected by Mary and Joseph Anning.

The huge ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus from the Early Jurassic of Germany. This specimen is about 7 m long, but other ichthyosaurs grew up to 21 m. Credit: Dr Ben Moon & Dr Tom Stubbs

Dr. Ben Moon added: "Even though ichthyosaurs were evolving more slowly in their last 100 million years, they are still known from many species, but with less variety between them.

"It's possible that we might find more ichthyosaurs out there that buck this trend, but it seems that this lack of variety was eventually the cause of their extinction when global conditions became less favourable around 90 million years ago. Ichthyosaurs were simply unable to adapt."Scientists put ichthyosaurs in virtual water tanks

More information: Early high rates and disparity in the evolution of ichthyosaurs. Communications Biology. DOI: 10.1038/s42003-020-0779-6

Journal information: Communications Biology

Faith-centered tattoos are analyzed in study of university students

by Terry Goodrich, Baylor University

With more than a quarter of U.S. adults now having tattoos—and nearly half of millennials sporting them—only a handful of studies have focused on religious tattoos. But a new study by researchers at Baylor University and Texas Tech University analyzes faith-centered tattoos and is the first to use visual images of them.

The study, published in the journal Visual Studies, analyzed 752 photos of tattoos taken at a Christian university in the United States and found that nearly 20% of those were overtly religious in content.

"The embrace of tattoos in the United States reflects a generational shift toward greater individualism and self-expression," said lead author Kevin D. Dougherty, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Baylor University. "Americans born since the 1970s have increasingly embraced tattoos as an acceptable means to communicate identity and belonging, whereas previous generations of Americans largely did not. Today, men and women in the United States are equally likely to have tattoos."

A 2016 Harris Poll showed that 29% of American adults had at least one tattoo—up from 14% in 2008.

"An interesting discovery in our research is that the religious tattoos of college students are more likely than non-religious ones to face inward, toward the owner," Dougherty said. An example is a tattoo on the inner wrist.

"We speculate that religious tattoos may serve a different purpose than do tattoos of favorite sports teams, occupations or hobbies. While any visible tattoo is a public proclamation, tattoos oriented toward the owner represent a personal reminder of identity or affiliation. In this way, religious tattoos are personal but not private. They may encourage individuals to live in accordance with their religious beliefs."

The study also found some evidence that a generally visible tattoo may be conceptually different from tattoos hidden by clothing, said co-author Jerome R. Koch, Ph.D., professor of sociology at Texas Tech University. He has studied body art on college campuses for more than a decade.

"Generally visible tattoos seem intended more toward stories of life and remembrance, which the wearer may be willing to openly discuss," Koch said. "Tattoos which are only visible, say, to someone else with whom they are intimately involved may be more closely tied to sense of self, private memories and/or emotional conflicts."

Photos used in the study were taken by sociology students as part of a semester-long research project. Researchers analyzed 752 photos by owners' gender; whether the tattoos were religious in nature; and tattoo size—small (1 inch by 1 inch or smaller), medium (3 inches by 3 inches) or large (larger than 3 inches or more than a quarter of an arm or leg). The study also examined whether the tattoo faced the owner or faced out; and whether those with religious content featured an image, text or both image and text.

The analysis found that:

Overt religious content appeared in 145 photos (19% of total sample).
More men in the photos (23%) had religious tattoos than women (17%).
Of the religious tattoos on women, most (69%) were small and in more easily concealed locations. The most frequent sites of their religious tattoos were the wrist (23%), foot (18%) and back (18%).
Men's religious tattoos were more likely to be large than non-religious ones (61% compared to 44%). Most prevalent sites for men's religious tattoos were upper arm (26%), forearm (21%) and back (19%).
Half of the religious tattoos were images—the most common being the cross. More than one quarter were text, often Bible references, with a slight majority being New Testament references. But the Old Testament book of Psalms was most popular. Images with text comprised 21% of religious tattoos.
Religious tattoos were more likely than non-religious ones to face the owner, with 26% facing inward, in contrast to 18 % of non-religious tattoos.

Researchers said they have no way of knowing if these findings apply to all students at the university or to students at other universities. They also say it is probable that they undercounted religious tattoos—in part because tattoos may have religious or spiritual connotations but not be recognized as such.

Dougherty and Koch are expanding their research to a national level with random samples.

"So far, all our work has involved college students as respondents," Koch said. "Since we know tattoos tell life stories, broadening our respondent base is the next logical step. How might life stories expressed through body art—religious and otherwise—differ by wider differences in the race, age and social class?"

"We have a study in progress on religion and tattoos in a national sample of U.S. adults," Dougherty said. "Our research question is: Do religious people in the United States today get tattoos? We also have plans for a national survey on religious tattoos. This will allow us to determine the percentage of Americans with religious tattoos and how they differ from other Americans without a tattoo or with tattoos that have no religious significance."

Future research also might examine how tattoos are viewed in other parts of the globe, Koch said.

"It would be interesting to compare and contrast the path toward legitimation of tattoos in different parts of the developed Western world," he said. "We have some information from other scholars that, for example, conservative Catholicism in Latin America may continue to stigmatize tattoo wearers. So broader religious/folk culture may be in play where there is greater antipathy or stricter cultural norms against body art. Conversely, some of our students have reported that the fact their tattoo was religious lent legitimation with their families more than a tattoo of another type might."

Are tattoos linked with individuals' health and risky behaviors?